QblePon is the best game

The best game.

I want to fix a problem with the internet.  First of all, I think we can all agree that QblePon is the best game.

But the thing is, I searched for a list of QblePon characters on the internet and as far as I can tell there isn't one.  This is ridiculous, people.  There's a list of animals with fraudulent diplomas, for Pete's sake.  Where is someone to go when they can't remember which QblePon character has the floppy disk in its head?  (It's Stanchmode)

So I'm here to help.  Please enjoy below a list of all the known QblePon characters.  There are probably more, but these are the ones that Hector mentioned when he described the epic game that he and This Kid played, which come to think of it may be the only game of QblePon ever played.

Before we begin, a little bit about the game itself.  It's a card game.  We know that two players can play it, and they sort of mostly take turns.  The characters seem to have a single stat: Something the range of one to five.  Also, in this episode of the TV show, it is revealed that Twirbirdler can do an attack called "Gashing Slice".  It is not known how the attack works in the game.

Well that's enough details, let's see some characters.  You know you want to look at them.  Here they are in alphabetical order:

Beestburdin

Stat: 5

"My main man and yours."

Hard to stop thinking about.

Feedems

Stat: 3

"All day long."

Combo: Good with Feedems (Jersey) and Feedems (Raw).

Feedems (Jersey)

Stat: 3

See also: Feedems.

Feedems (Raw)

Stat: 3

See also: Feedems.

Jamtape

Stat: 3

"Not actually a QblePon character."

Actually, a QblePon character.

Pantso

Stat: 5

Combo: Can be played with Skweezout.

Puckershine

Stat: 1

Robustolé

Stat: 1

"Some fourth level beeswax."

Not the best card to start with.

Seemingly Sam

Stat: 2

Skweezout

Stat: 2

Combo: Can be played with Pantso.

Stanchmode

Stat: 5

Tallsocket

Stat: 4

Twirbirdler

Stat: 3

Attack: "Gashing Slice"

Zappadasher

Stat: 1

May not have been played in Hector's game.

Zock Click

Stat: 3

There, problem solved.

Mancala AI

My kids were into mancala for a little while this year, and so I made a version of it that you (mainly my kids) can play in a web browser.  A secondary reason to do it was to explore more about the game and its strategies.

Looks like south has a pretty good lead here...

Here's some of what I learned from this paper: Design of Artificial Intelligence for Mancala Games:

There are around 650 billion board positions (depending on which rule set you use, here I'm focusing on "Kalah").  In the year 2000, someone at Caltech found the winning strategy for it - that is, they solved it so we can now know what the best move is in each position.  The player that goes first has a slight advantage in random play.  

For a simple human-player strategy, we could learn from the "Advanced Heuristic Minimax", which uses the following principles, weighing the earlier ones more strongly than the later ones:

• Maximize the amount of counters in your own store.
• Keep the opponents score to a minimum.
• Prefer to move the counters from your right-most pit.
• Have as many moves as possible from which to choose.
• Hoard as many counters as possible in the left-most pit.
• Keep as many counters on your own side as possible.

Below is a link to the online version I made, which has four computer opponent choices: Random Rachel just picks each move randomly.  Greedy Greg moves to take as many pieces as he can, choosing randomly when he can't capture.  Minnie Max uses a minimax strategy, looking ahead about 8 moves.  And then there's Foolish Frank, who also uses minimax, but makes the worst move he can find.

Mancalamity

(github repo)